President Obama just threw a grenade at small business. He implied that everything is done in a community setting with the government or outside help. He is implying that individualism and individual achievements should not be highlighted, as everyone and everything needs help. In his speech yesterday, President Obama referenced the involvement of the government in the development of the internet and in building roads and bridges. He is correct to say the government did involve themselves in those endeavors. That was the government of the people, by the people and for the people.

If we get into a discussion whether business owners want the government as their partners, the President is on the wrong side of the tracks. What is being debated is the matter of degree. How much government? How big should government be? Small businesses give back through taxes, jobs and charity but not by enlarging government. This is all about an attack on individualism and individual achievement. The implications is clearly is that we need the government and we need big government. Not a great position for capitalism, small business or entrepreneurs.

There’s your short summary of Obama’s rhetoric. If you’d like to hear a little more, then please keep reading.

When both the Chamber of Commerce and the NFIB repeatedly say a president sucks for creating business growth, and when survey after survey of small business owners validate what these two small business organizations are saying, then that president SUCKS. If you want Marxism, then don’t listen to the Chamber of Commerce or the NFIB. If you want a job and the opportunity to advance your fortunes in a nation that has historically been better than any other at allowing the opportunity to do do, then get this joker out of the White House.

Obama – the failed president who a short time ago said “the private sector’s doing fine” – has demonstrated that he has no business talking about businesses. He is simply an ignorant fool who does not understand how a free market functions. And that is why he has spent the last four years unsuccessfully attempting to “fundamentally transform” America into a centrally planned economic system that has failed wherever it has taken root.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

These two doctrinaire liberals couldn’t be more clear – which makes it frankly amazing that the left would now try so hard to twist their words now that their policies are being exposed for what they clearly and truly are: they are saying that businesses do not deserve to take pride and responsibility in their own success because the Government (with a big “G” because that is how they view government) contributed to that success by building roads and bridges and providing schools and other infrastructure. And they are using that as their justification that business owners therefore owe far more in taxes than they have been paying. Because the Government is more responsible for their success than they are.

That is PRECISELY what Obama was saying.

And that is why Jack Gilchrist as a successful small business employer is so pissed off at Obama:

In another comment I explained this to a liberal who never has and never will comprehend how the American economy functions:

There is absolutely no question and any honest person knows there is no question that what Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren are saying is that all people who build businesses are really just pirating off government infrastructure, such that they have no right to take any meaningful credit for the success of their businesses. And therefore business owners ought to be willing to pay their real god the Government what it is due with their sacrificial offering of high taxes. But that is simply bullcrap because: 1) Given that both successful people and unsuccessful people alike have all benefited equally from schools and roads, how can the schools and roads then possibly be the cause of the successful people’s success? It was those business owners’ hard work, risk, more hard work and good decisions that made them successful, not the public schools and roads that welfare slackers get just as much of as small business owners get. And 2) Given that these business owners were already forced to pay for this stuff by their already too-high taxes, it is frankly despicable for Obama to suck out business owners’ tax money for services, and then turn around and argue that because the government provided those services that Obama forced the business owners to pay for therefore meant that the business owners who were forced to pay for those services aren’t truly responsible for all the hard work and risks that they took that had nothing to do with the government.

As an example, I went to a public school when I was a kid. Do you know why I went to a public school? Because liberals forced my parents to pay property taxes that went into public schools and ONLY into public schools. My parents wanted us to go to Christian schools, but at that time they couldn’t pay the taxes that funded the government schools AND at the same time pay in addition to those taxes to send us to a Christian school. If my parents had been allowed to use their property tax money to instead send us to Christian schools, then THAT’S where we would have gone. If liberals had any decency they would be for VOUCHERS that allow parents to choose which schools to send their kids to. Instead, they condemn millions of children to failing government schools. And then take credit for it.

So what liberals are in fact doing is 1) forcing Americans to contribute to a government system and then 2) saying that since we benefited from the system that we were forced to contribute to, we are therefore not allowed to take any credit for our success that was based on our risks, our initiative, our investments and our time and our work. Instead Government should get all the credit and liberals can then justify their forcing people to pay even higher taxes on the basis of the taxes that they have already been forced to pay.

When Karl Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” the point he was driving home was that God is an illusion that was keeping the people satisfied in their economic misery. Marx believed that economic reality was the ONLY reality. And he believed that if his economic and political Marxism replaced God with “the State” (i.e., “the Government”), that the people would find the true happiness they had wrongly been seeking in God.

And of course all they found was misery and death. Every SINGLE timeany form of Marxism was tried.

Flopping Aces got all their video from Townhall. I got all the quotes from the following interview from Flopping Aces.

Go to either site to watch the videos of the interview.

CNBC’s Greg Hengler said that Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus

“…may have been the best defense of small business, and the most important attack on the Obama administration all year. Marcus knows a little something about small business, because his business – Home Depot – was once a small business before it became a very BIG business. Home Depot employs 320,000 people, so Mr. Marcus knows a few things about job creation.

Bernie Marcus had the following broadside blast against the administration that he clearly views as ruining America and ruining the US economy:

Now you take some of the people the President surrounded himself with, now think about it a second, they’re all academics…most of them…I mean all of them, they come out of Harvard they come out of Yale. These guys are all on tenure. By the way they’re all on tenure. Tenure means they get paid whether they work or not, tenure means they are on insurance for life, tenure means they don’t ever have to worry about anything just because they were there for a number of years. America is not that way. America is not that way. And if the President got out of, you know, Washington, in his cloak as I talked about, and started moving around the peasants which is people like everybody else in the world except for Washington. Washington has their own insurance plan, they got their own pensions, they don’t even abide by their own rules they everybody else lives by.

This “tenured” Obama “Washington” crowd sounds profoundly un-American, for what it’s worth. You get the sense they could have woke up in Moscow, circa 1950, and fit in with the commissars and their never-once-succeeding five year plans just fine.

And Bernie Marcus speaks with unforked tongue when he accuses the whole Obama administration of being a bunch of common-senseless eggheads with no actual private sector experience whatsoever:

You can see why an incredibly successful CEO who’s actually DONE SOMETHING to create real jobs in the real world would be rather pissed off at the two-years’-worth of Obama’s demonizing the job creators of the business world.

Bernie Marcus continues, apologizing to a president who appears to despise actual job creation for his record of actual job creation:

Marcus – And when I talk to people who are creating jobs today…these are not villains. These are not monsters. They’re not like…

Kernan – And you think they are being portrayed that way?

Marcus – Oh, there is no question about it.

Kernan – How many employees does Home Depot have?

Marcus – They got about 320,000

Kernan – So you, Arthur and Ken are directly or indirectly responsible for 300,000 jobs?

Marcus – Yeah, we’re monsters and we’re disgusting human beings and I recognize that and I apologize to America right now, I’m sorry that I made wealth and I’m sorry that I’m creating jobs.

Damn right they’re monsters. Tax those rich bastards. Tax them until they fire all their American workers and ship those jobs overseas in countries so evil that they actually allow people and businesses to keep more of what they earn. Tax them until the American economy crashes. Tax them until the USA goes the way of the Dodo bird.

And then vote for Obama to preside over the ruined formerly great nation he “fundamentally transformed.”

China has ten times – TEN TIMES – the growth of the United States, while having lower tax rates. And what do Democrats do? Try to raise our tax rates even more. And Democrats are employing Marxist class warfare and “spread the wealth around” redistributionist demagoguery to try to get their way. What is amazing is that the Democrat Party in the United States is literally more communist than the Communist Party in China.

Jobs today are global; they can go anywhere on earth. What American needs to do is respond to the countries’ that are taking our jobs away from us. Which is why we need to lower the costs of investing in and doing business in America. Democrats are demanding that we become less and less competitive even as they pursue a strategy of demonizing those who would make America MORE competitive.